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The Spotlight’s Bright Glare

IN CHARGE Desirée Rogers, preparing for an event in the East Room, is known as a perfectionist.Credit
Charles Ommanney/Getty Images

WASHINGTON

HEADS turned in the nation’s capital last January when a glamorous corporate executive from Chicago named Desirée Rogers arrived. Willowy and fashion-forward, with a chic pixie haircut, a designer wardrobe and a Harvard M.B.A., Ms. Rogers became the new White House social secretary — and promptly broke the dowdy mold for the job.

She posed for Vogue, turned up at the Thakoon runway show in New York and was quickly named the city’s best-dressed woman by readers of The Huffington Post. She drew on her marketing savvy to talk up “the Obama brand.” She organized a string of much-touted events — a poetry slam, jazz and country music nights — that helped turn the Obama White House into a nerve center for creativity and culture.

Now Ms. Rogers is in a different kind of nerve center: a Washington uproar over how a pair of aspiring reality television celebrities managed to get past the Secret Service to crash a state dinner for the prime minister of India. House Republicans demanded last week that she testify on Capitol Hill; the White House, citing “separation of powers,” refused. Suddenly, the social secretary has become the one thing no White House official ever wants to be: a distraction.

On the surface, the controversy is about a security breach, and whether Ms. Rogers contributed to it by failing to station someone from her office at Secret Service checkpoints as guests were arriving at the dinner on Nov. 24 — a practice of administrations past. The Secret Service has accepted full responsibility for the crashers, but in a memorandum issued last week, the White House deputy chief of staff, Jim Messina, announced that henceforth, social office employees will stand alongside members of the Secret Service at guard posts — an embarrassing rebuke of Ms. Rogers, though she was not named.

But a subtext emerged: the tale of a woman who, like Icarus, flew too close to the sun. The public conversation quickly turned to Ms. Rogers herself and whether she broke some unwritten code of social secretary dos and don’ts. She shouldn’t have attended the dinner as an invited guest. (Social secretaries rarely do.) She shouldn’t have paraded in front of photographers in an avant-garde Comme des Garçons gown. She should have been something Desirée Rogers is utterly unaccustomed to being: invisible.

Photo

COVER GIRL Marketing the president as a brand.Credit
Globe Newswire, via WSJ

“She brought her own imprimatur to D.C., but this is who she is,” said Linda Johnson Rice, a good friend and chairman and chief executive of the company that publishes Ebony and Jet magazines. “I don’t think you should compromise yourself just because this is who you are.”

As social secretary, Ms. Rogers is responsible for every event that goes on in the White House residence, from the Easter egg roll to Christmas parties to visits from heads of state. She must coordinate with chefs, florists, lighting technicians, military aides, musicians. Her job is to carry out the vision of the president and first lady, and to make their social events reflect their sensibilities.

The job can be a grueling one, with long hours and aching feet, and no detail is too small. When Ronald Reagan was president and hosted a dinner for Diana, Princess of Wales, the White House was worried about who would ask Diana to dance. So the social secretary discreetly arranged for the Marine Corps band to play the theme song from “Saturday Night Fever,” so that the movie’s star, John Travolta, who was also attending, could twirl the princess around.

Ms. Rogers came to the capital with clear ideas for her new role, rooted in the Obamas’ oft-stated conviction that the White House should be “the people’s house.” Working with the first lady, she set about opening the mansion’s doors. Young jazz musicians were invited to a Stevie Wonder concert. Gay families were included in the traditional Easter egg roll. Non-Irish people were invited on St. Patrick’s Day. Culinary students toured the kitchen and met the chefs.

“What do we want the personality and the tone of the experience to be?” Ms. Rogers asked in an interview earlier this year, describing the Obamas’ philosophy. “We want it to be inclusive, diverse, representative of all Americans, celebratory, authentic. So you sit and you say, O.K., how can we make this event” — and here, Ms. Rogers paused for a moment, adding, “Obama-tized.”

But Washington is a city that likes its traditions, and Ms. Rogers has raised a few eyebrows by trying to bend them. When former social secretaries gave a luncheon to welcome Ms. Rogers earlier this year, one participant said, she surprised them by suggesting the Obamas were planning a “non-religious Christmas” — hardly a surprising idea for an administration making a special effort to reach out to other faiths.

The lunch conversation inevitably turned to whether the White House would display its crèche, customarily placed in a prominent spot in the East Room. Ms. Rogers, this participant said, replied that the Obamas did not intend to put the manger scene on display — a remark that drew an audible gasp from the tight-knit social secretary sisterhood. (A White House official confirmed that there had been internal discussions about making Christmas more inclusive and whether to display the crèche.)

Yet in the end, tradition won out; the executive mansion is now decorated for the Christmas holiday, and the crèche is in its usual East Room spot.

In Chicago, where Ms. Rogers worked as president of Peoples Gas and North Shore Gas, local utility companies, and later as president of social networking for Allstate Financial, she was known for her glittering parties and for setting fashion trends. At the Ebony Fashion Fair last year, Ms. Rogers showed up in “a sexy, laser-cut Pucci dress under a suede Valentino coat,” The Chicago Tribune reported.

But beneath the clothes there is a woman of substance, friends say. Tom Patrick, the former chairman of the utility companies who was Ms. Rogers’s boss, recalls Ms. Rogers “slapping on a hard hat” to go out into the field with utility workers. He says she blends “the ability to get in there and roll up your sleeves and do the hands-on work, with the ability to mix and mingle with the right people.”

In Washington, Ms. Rogers has been busy; less than a year into the new administration, she has already planned 170 events. But none was so high-profile and historic as the state dinner for the Indian prime minister — the first state dinner of the first African-American president of the United States, planned by the nation’s first black social secretary.

State dinners are always a chance to showcase White House panache and style, but they are also protocol-bound affairs. Even so, the Obamas and Ms. Rogers managed to shake it up. For starters, the dinner was not in the State Dining Room, which seats only 140. Instead, to accommodate a much larger guest list of more than 300, it was held under a grand tent on the White House South Lawn. The menu was a mix of Indian and American favorites, another break from convention; most White Houses would shy away from serving Indian food to an Indian delegation, for fear of falling short.

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UNTRADITIONAL Desirée Rogers at the state dinner on Nov. 24.Credit
Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

The Saturday night before the big event, Ms. Rogers had dinner in New York with a close friend, Mellody Hobson, and said she had to fly back to Washington early in the morning to do another tasting.

“I was like, ‘Desirée, you told me you already did a tasting,’ ” Ms. Hobson recalled. “And she said, ‘No, no, Michelle — the first lady — has asked for something different, and I want to see it and know that it’s perfect.’ ”

And indeed everything seemed perfect as the event got underway. “Everything looks great,” Ms. Rogers declared as she strode past the rope line of photographers, wearing a pale, partly sheer dress, with strands of pearls between its layers. Robin Givhan, the Washington Post fashion writer with a sharp eye and an even sharper pen, instantly recognized the dress.

“Are you wearing Comme des Garçons?” Ms. Givhan asked.

“Of course,” Ms. Rogers replied.

Attendees say Ms. Rogers barely sat down at the dinner; her table included the actress Alfre Woodard. But the brouhaha over the party-crashing Virginia socialites, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, has marred her reputation for perfectionism, and forced the White House to confront questions about her performance and management style. So far, she has received unequivocal support.

“The first family is quite pleased with her performance,” said Robert Gibbs, the press secretary.

Ms. Rogers herself, meanwhile, is suddenly, uncharacteristically, in the background. She has not given any interviews, and the administration says it will continue to resist calls for her to testify, even as Republicans threaten to issue subpoenas. Friends say she is busy at work. The White House is expecting 50,000 visitors this holiday season, and the social secretary has parties to plan.

A version of this article appears in print on December 6, 2009, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Spotlight’s Bright Glare. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe